Australian universities are expected to contribute to Closing the Gap. Yet the Productivity Commission reports that Target 6, the national tertiary attainment target, is improving but not on track to be met.
The harder question is whether we are measuring how far Indigenous people are from a national benchmark, or whether institutions are meeting their obligations? Targets matter. But without clearly identified duty-bearers they remain aspirations rather than instruments for change.
The national scale: why Closing the Gap remains unattainable
Defining progress as a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians makes non-Indigenous outcomes the reference point. Taken to its logical end, Indigenous people succeed when they look like everyone else on paper.
Target 6 records whether attainment changes, not whether an Indigenous student’s rights to, in and through education have been met, or which institutions and decision-makers owe the corresponding duties. A target without an owner is a wish.
An Indigenous Rights-Based Approach reverses this logic: rights are held by Indigenous peoples; duties are held by institutions.
The university scale: training repeats the mistake
Training repeats the same problem at a smaller scale. It measures a non-Indigenous leader’s confidence, not whether an Indigenous student has received what they are entitled to.
Our 2025 ACSES Fellowship research found that 83% of surveyed university leaders had completed training in the previous two years, in four kinds: Indigenous cultural awareness, unconscious bias, cultural competency and cultural safety. None had racism in its name. Our subsequent analysis identified a confidence–competence paradox: 72% felt confident engaging with Indigenous peoples and communities, yet only 22% considered themselves very experienced in Indigenous higher education. Training produced confidence, not the capability to lead institutional change.
Almost 90% reported having an Indigenous strategy, but implementation often depended on individual interpretation and fell disproportionately to Indigenous staff. Our review of all 43 Australian universities found that only 20 publicly presented an identifiable Indigenous research strategy.
The problem is not commitment. It is that commitment has no clearly identified owner and no test of whether it has been fulfilled.
The word that travelled
Cultural safety was built for the clinical encounter. Under Ahpra’s National Scheme definition, safety is determined by the person receiving care, the work of achieving it belongs to the practitioner, and the standard is backed by regulation and complaint pathways. The definition also folds “free of racism” inside itself, so a provider can run a cultural safety program and believe it has met an anti-racism obligation.
Outside health, only the portable part travelled: the workshop. The regulatory spine stayed behind. The word now does the work racism used to do. When a comedian performed a mock Welcome to Country at a Melbourne rally last weekend, it was called satire, insensitive and disrespectful to culture. Every phrase had a cultural word in it and no racial one.
The next repetition: anti-racism
From 1 January 2027, every higher education provider must define and address racism under the amended Higher Education Standards Framework (Standard 6.4). The same standard requires providers to promote cultural safety. The sector is already asking whether anti-racism is the new cultural safety, and reaching for another workshop.
Awareness, anti-racism and rights have different objects. Awareness develops understanding. Anti-racism identifies and removes an institutional hazard. A right is an entitlement that someone has a duty to satisfy. Only the third tells a university leader what they owe, to whom, and how they can be held accountable for delivering it.
What a rights-based university does differently
Rights can be enacted because they name both the right-holder and the duty-bearer. A Dean of Health owes Indigenous students particular duties during clinical placements, including a learning environment that is culturally and racially safe. A Registrar holds different duties in admissions and student records. A generic training module specifies the responsibilities of neither.
Our Indigenous Rights-Based Approach (IRBA) sets out five domains of institutional duty: Indigenous-led governance with decision-making authority; Indigenous authority over research priorities, data and knowledge; curriculum transformation on terms set by Indigenous knowledge holders; community partnerships shaped by community-defined priorities; and portfolio-specific accountability, resourcing and transparent external reporting.
The professional scale: rights travel, awareness does not
Universities train the teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers and policy officers whose work influences every other Closing the Gap target. What universities measure themselves against shapes what graduates carry into classrooms, clinics and public institutions.
A rights-based consciousness developed at university travels with graduates: a way to identify who holds rights, who owes the corresponding duties and what evidence shows those duties have been met. Awareness does not: a leader can leave a workshop knowing more but owing nothing, and graduates inherit the same limitation. The application of IRBA to the Psychology Board of Australia’s Competency 8 shows the alternative: a professional standard framed around Indigenous rights and practitioners’ obligations. The Fellowship research examined institutional leadership, not graduate outcomes, so this is the logic of the argument rather than a measured effect.
What needs to change
Policymakers should rebuild education targets, and the implementation of Standard 6.4, around rights, identified duty-bearers and institutional accountability. Progress should be measured not only by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s distance from a non-Indigenous norm, but by whether institutions are fulfilling their obligations.
University leaders should replace generic training with portfolio-specific duties, resources and accountability. Every senior leader should be able to answer one question: what does my portfolio owe Indigenous students, staff and communities, and what evidence shows that obligation has been met?
That also means saying the word. If the harm is racism, name it as racism, not as a cultural issue. And it means redistributing the load: non-Indigenous leaders must take responsibility for changing the systems they lead, while respecting Indigenous authority over the decisions, knowledges and priorities involved. Systemic transformation cannot continue to be carried by the people the system is failing.
Peter Anderson is a Warlpiri and Murinpatha scholar, a professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous) at the University of New England. He is a Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Institute at the University of Oxford. His scholarship reframes Indigenous rights in education as a collective institutional responsibility, grounded in UNDRIP. He developed the Indigenous Rights-Based Methodology (IRBM) to move universities from access to genuine Indigenous student success.
Acknowledgement: We acknowledge Dr Carla Tapia Parada and Ashley Fox, who co-authored the two studies drawn on in this article.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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